[MUSIC PLAYING]
I felt that I had to learn how to make a picture faster,
cheaper, and still have, still have the energy in the film.
In fact, go further with a certain kind of camera move
and cutting and this sort of thing.
And when I first met Michael Ballhaus in--
Having had gone through a series of films up to about 1981,
up to King of Comedy, and sort of the bottom
fell out of everything after that.
But I did meet Michael when we were preparing
The Last Temptation of Christ in 1983
and I'd seen his Fassbender films that he had shot.
And I wanted a sense of freedom with the camera
again and freedom with light.
In a sense, I felt that with the bigger productions from--
as this is not the director's of photography's issue.
This had to do with how a film is made, the amount of people,
the amount of equipment I wanted to get something trimmer
and faster, you know.
And so I felt I should go back to independent style of film
making.
And I saw the Fassbender pictures
and then I followed up on that with meeting Michael.
And we were going to make Last Temptation,
but by the end of the year, the film fell through
and we were out in the diaspora, so to speak, out of Hollywood,
everywhere.
And couldn't get a picture made.
But finally, it was time to start all over again I felt.
And we stumbled upon, I think it was Amy Robinson and Griffin
Dunne gave me the script of After Hours .
And so I thought this was a good opportunity
to try to learn how to make a picture again and also
a project, of course, that I really responded
to because of the nature of the story and the character
being out of his element and being
in a place where he couldn't believe anyone or anything,
and he's sort of trapped.
And I thought this was--
That's the way I felt, myself, at the time.
And so I called on Michael again there.
And that's the first time we really had the ability
to work together.
We shot it in 40 nights, averaging about 25 to 26 setups
a night.
And so Michael would be on the set
and it was you know, downtown somewhere
in the old Soho, which, at that time,
was really isolated at night.
There was nobody there.
And I'd get there and I'd be kind of grumpy, concerned
about getting everything done, proving to myself
I can get something shot in a more efficient manner that
still had everything I wanted.
I'm not quite sure of this particular scene.
And he would look at me and says, ah,
but tonight, tonight we do the shot that begins on the chair,
tracks up, goes around the face, comes over to the telephone,
goes to the jukebox.
I says, oh, you're right, you're right.
Yeah, yeah, that's something--
See, we don't do it first.
No, no.
Of course not.
We're going to do it a little later because I
have certain lighting issues.
OK.
But he gave me something to look forward to
and brought back the excitement and the love of the process,
you know.
He said, look, we're going to have some fun tonight.
I mean, fun, I use that word, fun, for many different things.
One could have fun at--
say, well, we're going to have some fun
in an ironic tone of course.
But it really was bringing back to me
the energy and the excitement of filmmaking
that he re-instilled in me.
And I remind you, I had designed all these shots and drawings
and diagrams.
Smaller storyboards in a way on the edge of the script,
rather than in bigger drawings.
But Ballhaus studied them and made his own versions,
transferred them to his script and made his--
and he studied the shots, studied the understanding.
Tried to understand how the camera would move,
the use of the lens, which lens, size lens, all sorts of things.
Next then transferred over to Last Temptation of Christ
when we were shooting in Morocco.
A very, very, very low budget film.
The whole picture was designed on paper
mainly because that's the way I always design
a film as much as possible.
But even more so in that case because I
knew that if I had the chance to make the picture,
it was going to be very, a very low budget.
And I had to shoot very quickly so I
had to know exactly what I wanted in terms
of the framing, camera movements, editing,
and that sort of thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The first day of shooting, we knew it.
We understood that it was going to be an arduous shoot.
And after the second set up where just
trying to set up a tripod in the ground and things falling.
And he looked at us and said, well, this
is the way this film is going to be.
Every movement we make, everything we set up
is going to be hard to do.
So just accept it now, which we did, which we did.
And we worked as furiously as possible.
And later on too, at one point, things were so difficult
and I was so in despair about losing time and not
getting the right amount of extras and this sort of thing.
And I was just sitting there at one point,
I think about eight weeks into shooting and saying,
well, I said, maybe I should have waited.
Maybe I should've waited to have more money in the budget.
Maybe I should have waited-- knowing
I had waited six years, seven years, you know.
You know, to take the opportunity
to make the film then.
I had a very, very low budget.
And he said to me, no, no.
He said, this film has to be made this way.
The arduousness, the physicality,
and if one could term it, suffering that had to be done,
that's the nature of this work of this particular film.
Not that any film is luxurious in that way,
but this really became more than making a film.
It became a life experience.
And he was the one to point that out to me.
We had one company move from Marrakesh to--
Marrakesh, we shot outside Marrakesh,
a little village called Oumron, about 25 minutes outside
of Marrakesh.
Then we had one company move to a city called Meknes, which
gave a flavor of an urban center, suggesting Jerusalem,
we thought.
And so that was one big company move.
And that meant it was--
we couldn't afford a third.
We had wanted to go to another place, Ouarzazate,
but we couldn't do it.
And so the only thing was that we
found a quarry for the crucifixion that was really
very, very good.
And we thought-- and we wanted to keep the crucifixion
for the end of the film, the shooting,
but we had to shoot it in the middle in order
to take advantage of this location.
And I had designed, and I remember very clearly,
75 shots.
Whether they were notes or whether they were drawings,
it didn't matter.
They were design.
Figure 25 shots a day, all right?
Now it's a very hard scene to stage,
but we were under such pressure, particularly
because we were gone days over schedule
and we were running out of money that we had
to make that move at that time.
And I remember him and my AD and my producer
sitting in a small room five days before shooting,
or four days before shooting the crucifixion scene
and going through all the shots.
And saying, OK, instead of three days for these 75 shots,
we have two.
So, what could we lose?
And it became 50 shots, 25 and 25.
And we got them all.
And how he did that was referring back to something
he did with Fassbender, in particular,
a film called Beware, the Holy Whore,
where I think a few days into shooting,
Fassbender fired the lead actor and then took the role,
himself.
And so they had to re-shoot everything
that they had shot for those three days in one
day and night.
And how they worked it out was timing it so that for example,
in the crucifixion scene, if the first shot,
we would give 10 minutes.
The fourth shot was a little more complicated, 15.
If it goes to 17, we have to move on.
Accept what we have and move on.
There was one shot where Willem Dafoe cries out,
Father, father, why have you forsaken me, I think.
And the camera twists and turns.
He said that's, that's 45 minutes.
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And that's how we did it.
That's how we did it.
We just literally-- within that 10 minutes,
I used to call it quality time, we'd
be intent on getting what we needed to get.
Or if not, shooting an extra two takes, squeezing it in
to figure it out later, certain elements of the different
takes, which one I'd go with in the editing.
That was a very logical and a very also passionate way
of going about it.
Saying, we're going to get it, but we'll
have to combine these 75 shots into 50.
And we'll have 25 set ups a day, or 26.
We can do it.
And the thing was like a commando group.
We got there in the dark and the moment light broke,
we started shooting immediately.
And it was like being in a battle of some kind,
very, very physical.
He always made it clear to me about the value of what we're
doing in that particular shot or that particular day, you know?
And so what to go for, what to emphasize--
what I mean is what to go for, what to--
when I say go for, it means where to put the energy
and what to look forward to.
He was very clear about--
in a case like that, he didn't really
say this is the way this film has to be made,
but he kept saying, we will make it.
I kept, I kept knowing that everything's being taken away
or the script was being changed.
And there were lots of production problems,
but he would look at me and say, we're going to finish it,
we're going to make it.
Whether we did or not, ultimately doesn't matter,
but it's how we got through each day
of the skirmishes and the battles to make the picture.